Parents and teachers are struggling to prepare for the possibility that school will be online this fall.
“I’m terrified, honestly,” Kristienne, a mother of three from North Carolina, told the Washington Examiner. “I know my daughter’s friend’s mom is a single parent, an essential employee, and was coming home every day and spending hours every night helping two children with no other parental help.”
The fear of online classes this fall is keeping one stay-at-home mom from rejoining the workforce. “I was planning on going back in some capacity, but it’s really not realistic if I will have to put my younger two into a day care during the day,” Katie, a 37-year-old mother of three, told the Washington Examiner. Anonymity was granted to parents and teachers who commented for this article.
School closures during the pandemic affected 55.1 million students and caused panic among parents and teachers, who had to reorder their lives to handle the sudden change.
Students weren’t the only ones sent home. Millions of people lost their jobs during the coronavirus. Parents had to struggle to pay the bills while trying to help their children with schoolwork.
“I saw many other parents struggling, both with technology issues such as internet connectivity or not having the equipment they needed, as well as actually finding the time to teach the material to their kids,” said Rachelle, a substitute teacher from Texas.
“Parents were stressed,” said Karen, a 51-year-old kindergarten teacher from North Carolina. “I know kids were shuffled around so that parents could work.”
President Trump is urging schools to reopen this fall, but parents and teachers are still debating how to handle the virus.
New York City public schools have announced that they are not fully reopening this fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio has said, although the final arrangement is subject to the direction of state Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In the announced plan, school would be a mix of online and in-class learning. Classrooms would have no more than 12 people in the room. The plan would still leave parents struggling to help their children with online lessons or to find child care while they are at work.
Kristienne was able to get help from her mother to juggle her kids’ schooling. Kristienne’s mom took one of her daughters, who was doing relatively well with online learning, and Kristienne worked with her other daughter, who has a learning disability. “There was one week my mom attempted to take both girls just to see if she could do it. It was too much,” she said.
Some days, Kristienne or her mother would spend the majority of the day helping the girls with their education. With “the girls starting their work at 9 a.m. and breaking only for lunch and bathroom and my mom sitting at the table with them the whole time, it was taking 10 hours,” Kristienne said.
It was hard to keep up with lesson plans for the children and hard on the grandparents, Kristienne said. “They’re supposed to be able to enjoy the grandchildren without that sort of responsibility. Not to mention, I’m working 40 hours a week again and have even less time to help and make lesson plans.”
A child’s short attention span makes at-home learning difficult for many.
“Online schooling is not for everyone,” Katie said. “I’m very concerned with it for elementary-age kids, many will just not be successful.”
Katie’s husband has an irregular work schedule. It is impossible for Katie to go back to the workforce this year like she hoped, and she is planning on pulling her youngest out of public school if it implements hybrid learning.
Katie said that is is very hard to “juggle” her youngest as “he is more needy and hands-on than the other two, who are older and can do things on their own.” The youngest would distract her older children from their work, which is one reason why she won’t pull her older kids out of school.
In the pandemic, thousands of teachers have been forced online with no prior training. Although there was a struggle switching online for some teachers, they were able to help their students with the switch and with homework.
“It wasn’t very hard for us, but we are a very tech-savvy family,” said Rachelle, the Texas substitute teacher. Rachelle was able to help her own children along with some of her friends’ children with homework.
“It took quite a bit of balancing our schedules, my husband and I are teachers, after the initial adjustment that home and school were the same place,” Jamie, a mother of three from Pennsylvania, told the Washington Examiner.
Although teachers might have had an easier time adjusting with their own children this spring, they recognize that many parents were struggling during this time and need to plan ahead for the fall.
“Parents … it’s hard because if they work, they need to find someone to take care of the kids AND make sure they are doing their work. It’s a lot of pressure on parents, but they have time to prepare as they all know it is a possibility,” Karen said.
During the wave of shutdowns in the spring, 60% of parents did not have any help caring for their children, according to a survey from the Boston Consulting Group. It is going to be hard for many to find help for the fall, regardless of the time they have to prepare right now.
Parents need now to discuss plans for the fall if online learning is offered again, Rachelle said. “I do think that the schools could be preparing teachers and parents better ahead of time, but honestly, I don’t know how that would or should work,” she said.
Older siblings need to help their parents out with their younger siblings, Karen said. “Parents of younger kids have a tough job … especially if they work. Someone has to help them online with work and meetups,” she said.
